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| Birth Name(s) : Michael Nyman |
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Full Michael Nyman Biography
Michael Laurence Nyman (born March 23, 1944, London) is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, perhaps best known for the many scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
Nyman studied music composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1969, he provided the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, Down by the Greenwood Side and directed the short film Love Love Love before settling into music criticism, where he is generally acknowledged to have been the first to apply the term "minimalism" to music (in a 1968 article in The Spectator magazine about the English composer Cornelius Cardew). He wrote introductions for George Frideric Handel's Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 and conducted the most important interview with George Brecht in 1976.
Nyman, who had studied with the noted Baroque music scholar Thurston Dart at King's College London, drew frequently on early music sources in his scores for Greenaway's films: Henry Purcell in The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (which included Memorial and Miserere Paraphrase), Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber in A Zed and Two Noughts, Mozart in Drowning by Numbers, and John Dowland in Prospero's Books.Michael Nyman - Numbers
Nyman's popularity increased significantly after he wrote the score to Jane Campion's award-winning 1993 film The Piano. The album became a classical music best-seller. Although Nyman's score was central to the movie, he did not receive an Academy Award nomination despite being nominated for both a British Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He has scored numerous other films, the majority of them art films from Europe. His few forays into Hollywood composing have been Gattaca, Ravenous (with musician Damon Albarn), and The End of the Affair. He wrote settings to various texts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for "Letters, Riddles, and Writs", part of Not Mozart. He has also produced a soundtrack for the silent film Man with the Movie Camera.
Among Nyman's better known non-film works are the opera Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs (1987), for soprano, alto, tenor and instrumental ensemble (based on Nyman's score for the ballet La Princesse de Milan); Ariel Songs (1990) for soprano and band; MGV (Musique à Grande Vitesse) (1993) for band and orchestra; concertos for saxophone, piano (based on The Piano score), violin, harpsichord, trombone, and saxophone & cello recorded by John Harle and Julian Lloyd Webber; the opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), based on a case-study by Oliver Sacks; and four string quartets. Recently, he produced a new opera on the subject of cloning on a libretto by Victoria Hardie titled Facing Goya, an expansion of their one-act opera Vital Statistics. The lead, a widowed art banker, is written for contralto and the role was first created by Hilary Summers. His newest opera is titled Man and Boy: Dada, on a libretto by Michael Hastings.
Many of Nyman's works are written for his own ensemble, the Michael Nyman Band, a group formed for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello. Originally made up of old instruments such as rebecs and shawms alongside more modern instruments like the saxophone in order to produce as loud a sound as possible without amplification, it later switched to a fully amplified lineup of string quartet, three saxophones, trumpet, horn, bass trombone, bass guitar and piano. This line up has been variously altered and augmented for some works.
He has also recorded pop music, with the Flying Lizards; a version of his Bird List from the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway's The Falls appears on their album Fourth Wall under the title Hands To Take.
He is married to Aet Nyman and has two daughters, Molly and Martha. His first string quartet quotes "Unchained Melody" in homage to Aet, who appears in Greenaway's The Falls, for which he also composed music. Molly is a composer in her own right; in collaboration with Harry Escott she has written several film scores including for The Road to Guantanamo by her father's frequent collaborator, Michael Winterbottom. Martha is a development researcher for the BBC. Michael Nyman supports Queens Park Rangers football club.
*originally recorded by Nyman, Ned Sublette, Susan Krongold, Barbara Benary, Jon Gibson, Richard Cohen, Virgil Blackwell, Peter Zummo, and Peter Gordon at The Kitchen, and intended for Peter Greenaway's short film, The Tree. |
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